Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
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Sunrise at 06:00 UTC in one timezone would occur at 03:00 UTC three timezones over
Right, but I wouldn't want to keep my daily routine aligned to a different time zone than where I am.
So if you're travelling or even communicating across timezones, you haven't fixed anything by using UTC since daily activities (sleep, meals, etc.) are still correlated to when the sun is up or not
Exactly. So why would I want to adjust my alarm to 3am after travelling 3 time zones? I only care about relating the time between two zones for real-time communication with people in the other zone. And I'm not getting up at 3am for them.
I don't understand what you're asking here. I'm saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you'd still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you'd wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
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This really fails to acknowledge the hodegpode, anything goes chaos that was towns choosing their own noon based around someone with a watch and a bell looking at the shadow on a stick a few times a year.
Sometimes standardization isn't simply a terror induced by capitalism, and has accrual benefits.
It wasn't a hodgepodge; it was a system designed to the requirements of the day. Every town setting their own clocks to the local high noon wasn't a bad idea for a while. Hell, the ability to transfer the knowledge of time from another part of the world only came about a few generations before.
It wasn't until the railroads started operating where it became important for different cities to have the same time down to the minute. Until then, local noon worked well enough.
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Because who the hell wants to say it's 11 in the morning while it's dark out?
For no time zones?
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, "people like noon near solar noon", all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What're you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
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I don't understand what you're asking here. I'm saying if you kept UTC in every place on earth, you'd still have to relate those hours to a solar based local time. If you wake up at 6UTC in London and then travel to Moscow, the sun in Moscow would rise 3 hours earlier (guessing, not sure exactly what time time difference is). So if Moscow was also keeping UTC, they would set their alarms for 3UTC to wake up with the sun. If you travel to Moscow, you'd wake up at 3UTC with the sun, which is the equivalent of 3am London time, but is around sunrise locally. This is just how time zones work, so I have no idea where the confusion is.
I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn't reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
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Well, that is neat. When using metric and celsius:
- 1 kilometer is 1.000 meters.
- 1 square meter of water weighs exactly 1 tonne. (1.000 kilo also known as a kilokilo)
- The vastly superior metric dozen is exactly 10.
- Water freezes at exactly 0 degrees.
- 1 meter of water takes exactly 100 minutes - a metric hour - to completely evaporate when heated to 100 degrees. Doing so requires exactly 1 kilowatt of power.
Your last point is wrong, at least as you have stated it. Evaporation time is based on surface area, and the required power is based on volume, but you expressed the amount of water as a length.
Still, metric is way better.
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For no time zones?
βοΈDo you also want the day to change from Sunday to Monday in the middle of your Sunday morning? Or do we change days at different hours everywhere?
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The cultural relationship with time is more important than its absolute measurement.
Tell that to the trains.
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I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, "people like noon near solar noon", all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What're you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I'm struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?
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Do you also want the day to change from Sunday to Monday in the middle of your Sunday morning? Or do we change days at different hours everywhere?
Everyone changes days at the same time. That's the point.
You would get used to the switchover being in the middle of your working/waking day.
This wouldn't be a big deal and if it were the status quo I bet someone, if not you, would be saying how dumb having everyone on different days would be in the mirror universe version of this thread.
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I see this argument all the time. Forget all the tradition, "people like noon near solar noon", all that.
Date changes mid day some places and not others would be a nightmare for so many things.
What're you doing on the Tuesday half of June 15/16th?
This happens anyway. I literally have meetings every week where it's Tuesday night for everyone else on the meeting, and Wednesday morning for me.
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I mistook your original comment about the alarm clock. I wasn't reading it as the clocks in all timezones being set to UTC and rather that you wanted to keep your daily routine aligned with the daily solar cycle of the time zone you left.
Ahh, no! I was agreeing with the top comment that using UTC everywhere would cause more problems. Glad we're on the same page now!
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This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I'm struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Take some place currently having UTC+12 time zone, say Marshall Islands. Midnight by UTC, the moment date changes, is exactly noon there. So how should people there talk about time? There is no "Tuesday the 15th of May" there, because every day is one part one date, other part another date
So yeah. For computers and programmers "whole planet lives in UTC" might look like a boon (for a time I myself wished for it), but only until they start facing other, more twisted problems
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Everyone changes days at the same time. That's the point.
You would get used to the switchover being in the middle of your working/waking day.
This wouldn't be a big deal and if it were the status quo I bet someone, if not you, would be saying how dumb having everyone on different days would be in the mirror universe version of this thread.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a major PITA. At all.
"What's the date?"
"I don't know; what's the time?"
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
Momentum
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Milliseconds since the epoch is the only true time
2 more bits could have kept us in the same epoch pretty much forever. What were they thinking??
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Because timezones were a result of town specific clocks, which were a result of people liking certain hours happening generally in line with where the sun is, like "noon" which still technically refers to when the sun is at its highest point.
Its a simple matter to define noon as whatever utc time you want for wherever you are
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Here are some reasons told through what-if.
TL;DR:
People like to sleep in the dark generally, and businesses that close are open when more people are awake. -
2 more bits could have kept us in the same epoch pretty much forever. What were they thinking??
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You get over 584 million years in 2^64 ms. 66-bit computers are a bit tough to come by!
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You get over 584 million years in 2^64 ms. 66-bit computers are a bit tough to come by!
Unix time is 32bit seconds, not milliseconds
